Preface 6
Chapter 1 The New World and The New Architecture 8
Chapter 2 The Free Plan 28
Chapter 3 The Open Form 44
Chapter 4 The Natural House 70
Chapter 5 The Democratic Institution 90
Chapter 6 The Healthy City 116
Chapter 7 The New Regionalism 134
Chapter 8 The New Monumentality 152
Chapter 8 The New Place 176
Footnotes 198
Select Bibliography 201
Index 209

The machine age

The roots of the Modern Movement can be traced back to the profound
social and technological changes which characterised the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Cities in the western world were expanding. This urbanisation called
for a new approach to building- new technologies would have to be
embraced, offering cheaper, more efficient means of satisfying a larger
population and a growing number of industrial clients. In the United
States, the cities of Chicago and New York had embraced tall
metal-framed buildings in the second half of the 19th century.
Louis Sullivan, one of the most prominent members of the 'Chicago
School' of architects, coined the phrase "form follows function", a
mantra for Modernists ever since. Sullivan and his contemporaries built
astounding new skyscrapers, which would soon be a feature of cities
across the world.
But although these skyscrapers were modern, they were not modernist (Le Corbusier
criticised the Americans' lack of urban planning). The response of
European architects to the Americans' technological advances (including
bridges and other building forms as well as skyscrapers) would lead to
the development of Modernism.
And in the early twentieth century, technological advances were
rapidly changing western society. Road and rail networks were altering
the face of modern countries, people were more mobile, goods and
materials could be transported across the world easily and quickly.
Reinforced concrete (a strong and efficient material pioneered by
Auguste Perret); this and the availability of plate glass, meant that
architects would soon be able to celebrate this new technology in the
buildings they were designing.
Machines, in the form of cars, telephones, and ocean liners captured
the public imagination, and emphasised the positive force that
technology could play in people's lives. In 1921, Le Corbusier described
a house as "a machine for living in". Le Corbusier and others believed
that houses should have the purity of form of a well-designed machine.
The formal qualities of mass-produced cars and other machines were
therefore of great interest to them.

The shock of the new

Elsewhere in Europe, the short-lived De Stijl movement (1917-1931), a
collection of Dutch artists and architects, wanted to liberate the arts
from the shackles of tradition. Other movements such as Art Nouveau
(1893-1914) and Expressionism (1912-1923) also experimented with bold,
new forms and ideas, and in Russia the Constructivists (1920-1932)
emphasised honesty of materials and functional simplicity in their
(mostly public) buildings.
These movements appealed to many architects in Europe who felt that
their profession had become trapped in the past. They believed that the
new machine age demanded a new architecture.
In 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus School
in Weimar, Germany. This academy of architecture and design, although
only in existence for fourteen years, established a tremendous
reputation amongst the avant garde for its creative approach to
architecture and design, a reputation that lives on to this day.
Gropius' aims, as refined in 1923, in his text Idee und Aufbau,
included the idea that workers in all the crafts should design for a
better world using the idea of machine production as a stimulus.
New thinking on minimalist design and creating space was pioneered by Gropius' fellow German Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, who famously declared "less is more", and put his dictum into practice with his seminal Barcelona Pavilion in 1929.

Imagining a new world

One year prior to Barcelona, with the nascent Movement determined to
win over a doubting public and architectural establishment, the Congres
Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)
had met for the first time. An immensely influential think-tank, CIAM
sought to formalise the various roots of Modernism into a coherent set
of rules. Its opening declaration called for architecture to be
rationalised and standardised, and to be seen in context of economic and
political realities.
In the years that followed, CIAM produced many radical and ambitious
documents which sought to place architecture at the centre of economic
and political discussions about building a new and better world.
And with the backing of CIAM, the Modernists began their mission to
make architecture not simply about the building of buildings, but rather
about the construction of a new way of living.